As someone that chairs a private limited company operating in the field of teacher recruitment, I always read the annual accounts published by the owners of the TES Group with interest. The latest, just released, provide details for the year up to the 31^st August 2019, so aren’t all that recent. Normally, the annual accounts for the previous year appear on the Companies House website sometime in the following May. However, the accounts for the year up to the 31^st August 2019 have only recently appeared.

The Group now files its overall Group accounts under the name of Tes Topco, for anyone interested in reading what has happened since the group was sold by one American Group to another.

I can sympathise with the directors. The bottom line for 2018-19 was a loss across the business, after everything, including finance costs, were taken into account, of some £67,000,000. That’s a chunky loss on revenue of less than £100 million, and was generated well before covid-19 affected the teacher recruitment market.

The ‘Attract’ part of the business – basically the on-line recruitment part of the Group, and once the jewel in the crown – registered a decline in turnover compared with the previous year, to around some £61,000,000. It isn’t possible to work out how much of this revenue came from schools in England, how much from schools elsewhere in the United Kingdom and how much for overseas.

However, let’s say schools in England paid upwards of £40,000,000 for what they could obtain for free from either TeachVac or the DfE vacancy website. Interestingly, as far as the TES was concerned, point of sale advertising revenue continued to decline in favour of subscriptions by schools.

This part of the business is supported by the large pool of teachers visiting the site to hunt for a job. Now that teachers are not a scare commodity, will schools want to renew their subscriptions? What happens if jobseekers divert in large numbers to either the DfE site or TeachVac? Is they do, why would schools continue to use the services of the TES job board?

An interesting question is whether the loss per teacher incurred by Tes Topco is anywhere near the level incurred by TeachVac? At present, TeachVac costs less than £3 per vacancy advertised to operate. You can do the maths for the Tes on say £40 million in revenue and possibly, being generous, 70,000 vacancies advertised by schools in England in 2018-19.

Looking forward to the effects of covid-19 on schools, the accompanying report estimates a loss on the vacancy and supply teacher part of the business of some £8 million. This assumes, as at present is the case that schools return for the autumn term, and there is no more lockdown across the board. The latest announcements for the autumn about what might happen do try to protect schools, but I am not sure that these measures will encourage schools to enter the teacher recruitment market unless absolutely necessary.

If TeachVac costs £3 per vacancy, and the DfE can spend anything it likes to keep its vacancy site alive, what future is there for an expensive paid site in England, regardless of whether schools pay for each vacancy advertised or take out a subscription?

I wonder if there is now more value now in the other parts of Tes Topco’s business than in the ‘attract’ part, even though it still dominates the revenue stream for the business.